"Consider a frictionless angel falling from heaven...."

"Zombie attack sex."
"Zombie attack sex! They're coming to eat your ... uh ... okay."

"I think this tomato is supposed to be the clitoris."

"It would have been nice to do something for our wedding anniversary other than shop for clothes for ritual sex magic but, well, we gotta be us."

"We went to the chiropractor!"

I seem to have accidentally become the keeper of the family religious calendar. You see, because of my own obsession with building my own religious calendar, I have a draft version of it up in Google calendar. To this I have added the family chore rota calendar, the family medical appointments calendar, the family "fun stuff we might like to do" calendar, artan_eter's class schedule calendar, the moon phase calendar, the Jewish calendar, and probably a couple of others that I can't think of at the moment. My Google calendar is a deeply cluttered place.

But anyway - between trying to track my own religious observances and keeping up the professional blog (where I try (and even often succeed) to write about festivals a few days before they happen), I check my calendar regularly. Which means things like calling up teinedreugan a few weeks ago to ask him to pick up hamantashen on the way home for whispercricket. (KJ has declared these "hashmashin!")

This leads to things like the Egyptian pagan pottering about making a horseradish-crusted roast over roasted salted celery and matzo ball soup on her dinner night. Currently roasting garlic.

My life: it makes me happy.

Yesterday, whispercricket and I went to the mall to do various errands and get out of the house a little. We sat down on a wall near the "we buy gold" booth to eat some pretzels with the kids.

One of the people at the "we buy gold" booth I thought might be a guy who was at the "we buy gold" booth in the mall near the old house, and when he started chatting about how much he hated his job because it was basically to take advantage of people in desperate circumstances, and how he got into trouble occasionally giving people more money for their gold than the company would prefer, I was increasingly convinced.

So I watched him closely. He was keeping his arms crossed as he complained - I think he's lonely in addition to having moral qualms about his means of employment. Eventually he moved them and I spotted what I'd noticed when we'd spoken before - a tattoo on his arm of a stylised UU chalice.

"Ha, we spoke at Burlington before. You gave her a balloon," I said, indicating KJ. "I recognise your ink."

"Oh, are you UUs?" he asked.

whispercricket said "She is."

He commented that he had been on break from the seminary he was studying at, and now it's closed down and he wasn't sure what to do. I said, "Oh, my sister's at Starr King."

"Yeah? Starr King is amazing. My mother went to Starr King. And while I take her as a role model - and her spirit continues to guide me - I just. They say you have to kiss the feet of her statue to get into Starr King and I ... need to have my own life...."

So I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm a UU from childhood like he is, rather than, y'know, referring to the sister I adopted a few years ago. ;)

I have been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder: Hashimoto's.

I am non-sarcastically thrilled.

( Explanation follows. )


In unrelated but still semi-medical notes, meanwhile, I would like to draw the attention of particularly fierceawakening and miz_evolution to Dresden Codak's Cyborg Pride T-Shirts, because regardless of anything else in the universe I suspect that you will be pleased to know that such a thing exists.

While "Google hangouts" has occasional digitisation mangling the sound which means I am missing half the jokes, I am greatly appreciative of the ability to attend the commitment ceremony of brooksmoses, suzanne, tiger_spot, chinders, and the other one, who isn't on my flist ;) , from a range of some three thousand miles.

"You don't get to be sensible. You get to learn to truly love, which is beyond sense."

My fifty pounds of magazines has arrived at last.

I seriously can't write sober-sounding announcement copy anymore and this is my personal journal so I'm not gonna, mneah. I wrote it. I got art for it. It is done. it is a real book, as papersky said once, with pages and everything.

So for all you people who years ago responded to my whimsical description of the Egyptian Book of the Dead as "a cross between a hymnal, a grimoire, and the Lonely Planet Guide to the Underworld" with "Lonely Planet Guide to the Underword? I'd buy that!", now you can.


Official announcement from the publisher.

Official announcement from me with my professional hat on.

You can BUY IT RIGHT HERE.

I mean, if you ignore the fact that I spent much of my actual birthday kind of pissed off by nothing at all except perhaps the existence of other sophonts breathing the air I was trying to breathe.

First: I spotted, when reading back entries here and there, someone who was selling a complete set of back issues of KMT for notably less than it would take to accumulate them individually. Which, mind, I couldn't afford, so I sent a plaintive email to teinedreugan asking about.

Then artan_eter brought me the mail, which had two items for me. One of them was my contributor's copy of Sekhmet: When the Lion Roars. The other was a thick envelope from my father, which contained a bookmark, a stack of photos (mostly of my late cat Misty), and a birthday check for $LARGENUM, a sum roughly equivalent to the asking price for the magazines.

So I arranged for the purchase of the magazines.

Then I spent a while while hiding from the world and being cranky pounding on wordpress to set up a professional blog, because my first book The Traveller's Guide to the Duat is due out impendingly, and having professional presence under the name on the spine of that is worth doing. So if anyone wants to follow the professional blog, check out Peaceful Awakenings.

Talked with my father, who was amused to learn what he had gotten me for my birthday. Put my mother in touch with Immanion's publicist for her own book marketing.

Today we did some work in the old house which we really need to fix up and sell. whispercricket minded both of the kids, and sent us video of KJ playing outside.

Then this evening we went into Cambridge for a birthday dinner for me. Since I'd been to Mary's with baratron, we went to the Central Kitchen because they have very good steak tartare. At some point I really want to have a favorite restaurant dish that isn't in Central Square? But. I got what I wanted (steak tartare and good bread) though I missed out on sweet, fruity wine, which would have been my trifecta.

Then I walked up to Seven Stars with artan_eter and KJ. I asked the proprietor if he ever hosted events or signings, he said no. I said I had a book coming out soon, you see. He expressed some curiosity, I mentioned that I was aware that POD presses aren't exactly in high demand in brick-and-mortars, he said that actually he didn't worry about that - he would take the book on consignment, and if it sold well he would then order it straight up. So I will get my book into at least one brick-and-mortar!

I celebrated by buying books, because Seven Stars is one of the few metaphysical bookstores (or indeed any bookstores since Mac and Moore closed) that has stuff that's useful to me regularly on the shelves.

A new year, eh?

(Tweaks time, goes to bed.)

We did a dry run today of me on solo parenting duty so I'm not blindsided when whispercricket goes back to work. THis has meant managing bottles (a new skill), trying to handle two children at once (though this was made easier by KJ going off to "Find Mommy!" and being atypically self-contained today), and so on.

I have survived.

But I am waiting for teinedreugan to get home so I can go off-shift.

Went with whispercricket to the library booksale at the Andover Public Library, got two books for KJ and one for me. Went to chiro. Got dropped off at the subway, went to Pandemonium, got books (Tyler did not entirely approve of me using the gift certificate meranthi and thastygliax got for teinedreugan, but figured that he knew y'all well enough that it was probably not nefarious), met up with baratron, who has done research to determine that the last time we managed to see each other was January 2005.

Puttered about acquiring books with baratron (several by papersky), discussing life, the universe, and the things that KJ was raiding out of the dice shelf and presenting to baratron for opinions and approval. I was impressed by how little of the contents of the dice shelf was randomised - she would play with one item for a bit, then carefully put it back where she'd gotten it from (she required my help replacing one box of mixed dice and refused to put it anywhere but where she'd gotten it), and then selected different dice (or occasionally tokens) to investigate. I wound up getting her a 2d6.

Went to Mary's for late lunch and further chatting, which was occasionally interrupted by Baby Science!. I managed to clean up most of the baby science before we left....

Thanks to people with suggestions, it appears the book I need is in several Boston universities, so it is possible I might be able to extract it sooner than I can scrape up the $140 for my eminently necessary own copy. ;)

Trying to comb the tangles out of my life is a fiddly, fiddly thing. It's a two steps forward, one step back thing at all times, and this has been a rough while - hell, it's been a rough year - which means it feels like a lot more back steps than forward steps even if I look at it closely and recognise that's not right, really.

Possibly it's that I have too much pirouetting and not enough promenade.

KJ likes to run in circles around things. "Baby run circle!" she proclaims. "Run circle mama!" when she's orbiting me. Like that, only I don't enjoy it as much as she does?

( It's always a third way. )

Horrible cold has turned into ear infection from hell.

So much pain.

Hungry.

Can't swallow without more pain.

WAAAAAAAAAh.

Time to argue with S2, which I've been actively avoiding for years, in order to make my comment pages stop hurting my eyes.

And then I'll see if I can make my pages look right again.